IFA’s clubs purportedly go up to 20,000, however I was unable to find monthly commission rates for the upper-tier clubs.

Joining IFA

Affiliate membership with IFA is R65 ZAR a month ($4.50 USD)

Conclusion

The glaring problem with IFA’s MLM opportunity is the complete lack of retail activity taking place.

IFA affiliates sign up for insurance policies and are then paid to recruit others who do the same. And IFA are quite open about this, as per their own marketing material:

Make sure your team understands how IFA works and how they need to invite others.

Make sure that everyone in your team understands the importance of paying premiums and business fees.

As long as IFA affiliates pay their fees and recruit new affiliates who do the same, everyone gets paid.

The problem with this model is, in the absence of retail activity taking place, it’s a product-based pyramid scheme.

IFA’s insurance policies could be substituted for anything. There’s no way to determine whether affiliates have a genuine interest in their purchased insurance policy, or if they just have one or more because their IFA upline told them it was “important”.

The Clientèle Life policies seem legitimate enough on their own, but within the context of an MLM recruitment scheme are ultimately irrelevant.

As with all pyramid schemes, if recruitment in IFA dies down those at the bottom of the scheme will likely stop paying their monthly fees.

This means those above them stop getting paid, and unless they can find new affiliates to recruit, soon enough will also stop paying their monthly fees.

To their credit IFA have been in business now for 18 years. Attrition rates and/or average affiliate earnings however are not disclosed on the IFA website. Thus the actual overall health of the business is difficult to determine.

One last point I’ll mention is the 80% commission rate drop on Funeral Plan, Hospital Plus Plan or Foundation Plan (life component) policies.

Unless I’m missing something, holders of these policies are subject to increasing fees each year while after four years, IFA affiliates cease being paid out altogether.

This is pretty shonky from an affiliate standpoint and makes it all the more difficult to build long-term residual income.

If you’re genuinely interested in Clientèle Life’s insurance polices, there’s nothing stopping you from purchasing them through Clientèle Life directly.

Every person you meet is someone you can invite to an IFA Presentation but they may not have the same goals as you. Think about the type of people you want in your team.

Before you invite someone, consider whether they would be able to pay the IFA business fee and premium.

Write down all the people you can invite to join you in IFA.

This is called a prospect list. The best prospects include friends, relatives, neighbours, social groups and people you work with.

A good introducer always follows-up with his or her team (downline).

Following-up means that you need to check on your new IFAs every week and make sure that they are doing what you are doing… inviting new prospects every day.

Unless you’re keen on being that person family and friends avoid like the plague, IFA’s current MLM model is probably best avoided altogether.